d le Petit Picpus. The Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Paris, the Barriere des Sergents, the Porcherons, la Galiote, les Celestins, les Capucins, le Mail, la Bourbe, l''Arbre de Cracovie, la Petite-Pologne--these are the names of old Paris which survive amid the new.
The memory of the populace hovers over these relics of the past.
Le Petit-Picpus, which, moreover, hardly ever had any existence, and never was more than the outline of a quarter, had nearly the monkish aspect of a Spanish town.
The roads were not much paved; the streets were not much built up.
With the exception of the two or three streets, of which we shall presently speak, all was wall and solitude there.
Not a shop, not a vehicle, hardly a candle lighted here and there in the windows; all lights extinguished after ten o''clock. Gardens, convents, timber-yards, marshes; occasional lowly dwellings and great walls as high as the houses.
Such was this quarter in the last century.
The Revolution snubbed it soundly.
The republican government demolished and cut through it. Rubbish shoots were established there.
Thirty years ago, this quarter was disappearing under the erasing process of new buildings. To-day, it has been utterly blotted out.
The Petit-Picpus, of which no existing plan has preserved a trace, is indicated with sufficient clearness in the plan of 1727, published at Paris by Denis Thierry, Rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the Rue du Platre; and at Lyons, by Jean Girin, Rue Merciere, at the sign of Prudence. Petit-Picpus had, as we have just mentioned, a Y of streets, formed by the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which spread out in two branches, taking on the left the name of Little Picpus Street, and on the right the name of the Rue Polonceau. The two limbs of the Y were connected at the apex as by a bar; this bar was called Rue Droit-Mur. The Rue Polonceau ended there; Rue Petit-Picpus passed on, and ascended towards the Lenoir market. A person coming from the Seine reached the extremity of the Rue Polonceau, and had on his right the Rue Droit-Mur, turning abruptly at a right angle, in front of him the wall of that street, and on his right a truncated prolongation of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had no issue and was called the Cul-de-Sac Genrot.